'Hack License' opens in Newburyport

Wednesday

Apr 10, 2013 at 12:01 AMApr 10, 2013 at 10:16 AM

Hamilton playwright Dan Sklar's "Hack License" is set to open at the Actor's Studio in Newburyport this weekend.

Lycanthrope. It’s somebody with lycanthropy, of course. Which is to say it’s someone who can, or must, change from human being to wolf. We’ve all been there, right? It’s also the name of a short play by Hamilton playwright Dan Sklar, staged last year at the Boston Theater Marathon. It’s the 10-minute piece clipped from a larger work called "Hack License," a full-length play about a young, female cabbie’s adventures in New York.

The show was first staged three years ago at the North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative, a Port play development series. "Almost to the day," says Sklar, an Endicott College professor. The current production, which runs April 12 to 21 at the Actors Studio, is a Stage Three production, a theater lab designed to promote new works. It’s a full production – lights, costumes, sets, the whole theatrical deal – but, technically, not a premiere because it has been staged somewhere else, in one form or another.

There have been some changes since the first reading. Nothing too substantial: A couple of characters who didn’t add a whole lot to the experience (Sklar admits to writing bigger than most companies can comfortably stage) and a general tightening up. Even so, "Hack License" still weighs in big, with 11 actors. And, the changes to the script? That’s fine. "The way I see it," he says, "is I put it out there, the work. The director looks at it, sometimes he sees something in it and reacts to it. Then the actors look at it, and they see something else. And I think that’s great. It’s more than fine. Sometimes the playwright doesn’t see the subtext.

"I love bringing new eyes to a show," says the playwright, who teaches creative writing at Endicott and is editor of the Endicott Review. "I love the different spin other people put on the work. That excites me. That’s what it’s all about. It’s the collaborative nature of theater. We’re all working together, sometimes coming at it from different places. Invariably, they are right."

The play is based on Sklar’s own experiences — sort of. The 60-year-old Hamilton resident moved to the North Shore from New York, where he painted apartments and drove a cab while studying acting and getting a master’s degree in English from New York University.

He met his wife, Denise, in the city. She was a dancer. He started looking for a respectable job, as a teacher, but there was nothing, and the Big Apple started feeling oppressive. They wanted out. She had Salem roots, so they ended up here. He started painting again, and feared he would be smelling turpentine the rest of his life.

Then, one day, he found himself outside Endicott. He just walked in and got an interview. Which sounds unlikely and not the best approach to landing a job, but the timing was right, the English department had one retirement, one firing and one guy just walking out the door.

They needed someone right away. Sklar showed them his resume and one of his poems — and he landed the job. That was a quarter-century ago. In 2001, he published "Hack Writer: Poems, Stories, Plays." In 2008, he followed up with "Bicycles, Canoes, Drums," a collection of stories.

"Hack License" looks at Maryanne Hobson, a Louisiana-born belle making it as a cabbie in the big city. She’s not DeNiro, and this is not "Taxi Driver," even though it takes place in New York, mostly around 57th Street, mostly in a now-defunct Checker cab.

The story is funny and touching, not dangerous and creepy. Her fares spill their guts, using the friendly, Southern stranger as a sounding board, trying to sort out their issues.

As she helps others, she ultimately reveals herself through her interactions. She’s 22 years old, roughly the same age as Sklar was when he drove a cab, back in the late 1970s.

It only took about 30 years to get around to writing about the cabbie’s life.